Ask A Hottie: I Faked Like I’m Cheating On My Boyfriend And He’s Pissed

4 months ago

Welcome to “Ask a Hottie,” Break’s weekly column in which I spend several paragraphs shitting on people for their asinine relationship problems while my own love life is in shambles. You hear that, world? SHAMBLES. Look at me, my hair is pink, I ate Nutella for dinner yesterday and this morning I couldn’t find a Kleenex, so I blew my nose into a dirty sock.

I may be on a downward spiral, but at least I’m not “Erica,” who shot herself in the foot, then went back for seconds when she realized her shotgun holds two shells, not just one.

Got a question for Rebecca? Send it to AskABreakHottie@gmail.com!

Q: I’ve been with “Jared” for one year. He is my absolute dream and other than a few fights we’ve worked through, things have been smooth sailing. I couldn’t imagine myself being with anyone besides him, but I think I messed up.

I play video games online and recently joined a guild. I don’t give out my name or location to any of these people, but one guy, “Chad,” added me on Snapchat and started to send me pictures every day to make a “snap streak.” I don’t respond to most of them, but then I realized that it would probably look weird to my boyfriend if he saw a random guy’s name pop up on my phone all the time, so I changed Chad’s name to “Christina” so it wouldn’t look bad. Jared has also accused me of cheating in the past (I haven’t!) and I wanted to avoid another incident.

The other day Jared saw Christina pop up on my phone screen and asked who that was. I am not a good liar, so when I fumbled and said she was just a friend he hasn’t met (he knows all my friends and even said I’ve never mentioned a Christina before), he opened the snap and saw it was a message that said “Nice ass.”

The photo he was commenting on wasn’t even a picture of my butt, it was a photo from my story and he was making a joke. Jared didn’t take it like that though and assumed I was cheating on him. I tried to convince him it was just a friend, but eventually cracked and told him what I did with changing the contact name. He won’t believe me when I say that nothing romantic is happening between me and Chad, and it doesn’t help that he caught me in the middle of a lie. We’re on the verge of breaking up over a stupid Snapchat.

What do I do?

A: There’s a saying that goes “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” In this case, the stupid game is you trying to avoid making yourself look like you’re cheating on your boyfriend when you aren’t cheating on him in the first place…

…and the stupid prize is that your boyfriend now thinks you’re cheating on him.

You say accusations like this have flown around in the past, so I get why you changed Chad’s name in your phone, even if it was stupid. Whenever I made a new guy friend while I was dating my ex, I never changed the contact name. Why? Because I’m not fucking afraid of negative ramifications should he have decided to act like an insecure twat. You know what you do when someone whines in your ear and tries to make you feel guilty for something you haven’t done? You push them down a ravine and then while they’re stunned, hold their face in the mud until they suffocate and die.

…er, that’s the illegal option. The other option is to calmly explain your side of things, and when they accuse you of lying and all that other bullshit you say “Jared, I have explained the truth of what happened. You can either believe me or don’t, but either way do not call me a liar when you have no proof of your version of events. If you really feel that I am cheating on you then by all means, leave. But I am not, and if you can’t see that I’m not lying then fuck off.”

Are you stupid for changing his name in your phone? Yup. But I can see how you’d wind up doing that if Jared has an identity crisis every time a particularly raunchy ad for Fruit of the Loom comes on, so in the future (and there will be a future, because Jared is really just throwing a hissy fit) stand your ground. In fact, had you just come clean in the first place and said “Oh he Snapchats me a lot and I was afraid you’d accuse me of cheating on you so I changed his name in my phone to avoid a fight,” you could’ve opened up a great discussion on Jared’s insecurities and willingness to accuse you of cheating all the time.

But you didn’t. Your biggest mistake here was to keep lying after he caught you, because now it sounds like you concocted this stupid story to get out of trouble. The only solution here is to have Chad intervene and say the two of you have never met and barely communicate; it would help if Chad is a 2/10 sewage licker, because that way your boyfriend can look at him and be like “Wow, there’s no WAY she cheated on me with this guy.” If Chad is 6’3” and chiseled like Hercules after six rounds of injectable steroids, sorry – you’re fucked.

It’s not the answer you want to hear, but in all honesty you’re just going to have to wait until Jared cools off before you try to hammer some sense into the plywood he calls a brain. Or, you could evaluate your relationship as a whole, realize that Jared’s insecurities are totally ruining your buzz and let him fuck off.

Or OR, if you want to be alpha as fuck, you could try and find out if HE’S the one cheating on YOU since most cheaters like to project their guilt onto others. Wouldn’t that be a great plot twist? For us, not for you – for you that would suck. But please, if Jared is actually cheating on you then let us know what happens, if only for my sick sense of amusement and desire to regurgitate other people’s drama on Break.

Last and final “or”: tell Jared you’re willing to have a threesome with him and Chad to win him back. This is a no-good terrible fucking idea, but the people who read this column get half-mast whenever a threesome is possible (no matter how unlikely). Will it make it sound like you’re cheating on him even more? Yes! Like I said, terrible idea – but if he dumps you and you’ve gone through every other piece of advice I’ve given you…fuck it, might as well throw a Hail Mary.